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Tuesday, January 7, 2014

Read Through the Bible in a Year

Our
church focus to begin 2014 is “entering the story of God.” We are getting into the Bible and getting the
Bible into us so that our lives are shaped by God’s Spirit speaking through
God’s word.

In
the first sermon in this church-wide emphasis on Bible reading, scripture
memorization was suggested a way of entering the story of scripture. If a person memorizes a verse every 2 weeks,
by the end of the year, he or she will have 25 verses they’ve memorized. The memorization in and of itself is good,
but the real value is the way the memorized verses begin to shape the thinking
and outlook of the individual Christ-follower.
If all I can say is, “I memorized this or that verse,” well, who
cares? But, if I find myself in life
situations that call upon me to choose and I find that when I need to choose my
first thought is a scripture passage that has been imprinted on my brain, then
the memorization is directly coloring who I am.
I am God’s and the Word is a reminder and a guide.

Another
pathway is to take in the entire scope of the story of the Bible. Read the entire Bible through in 2014. By the time you decide to do this, it may be
January 10th or something like that.
If that is the case, then read the Bible through by January 10,
2015. Or read a little extra so you can
complete the read-through by December 31, 2014.

Ewordtoday.com
has several programs to guide you as you go to read through in a year. You could simply pick up, start in Genesis, and
not stop until you finish Revelation. I
have done that and it is a neat way of reading through, but not the only
way. Ewordtoday offers several programs
(http://www.ewordtoday.com/year/).

I
offer one comment related to this. The
Eword site asserts as fact some details about the Bible that actually educated
theories, but not established facts. A
notable example is the book of Job. One
of the Eword programs is to arrange the Bible chronologically. A popular theory suggests Job lived before
the days of Abraham. Thus in the
chronological read through program, readings in Job fall within the readings in
the book of Genesis.

The
fact is no one knows when Job lived. It
is even possible that the book of Job is a parable and not a history. It is also possible Job was a historical
figure. The Eword site accepts the
latter theory, asserts it as fact, and locates Job in the primeval history (the
era described in Genesis 1-11). This is
fine, and it might be accurate. I do not
endorse this interpretive decision, but I do recommend that if you want to read
through the Bible in a year, the Eword site is helpful. And I highly endorse the notion of reading
through the Bible in a year.